{Morii} From The Deep

This was originally a thrown vessel that had started flopping over before I had taken it off the wheel. Instead of scraping it and waiting for the clay to dry out a little to use later, I decided to round off the bottom of it to make a shell/cornucopia shape for something to be crawling out of. I hadn't intended for this piece to be as large as it ended up being. I tried to make the "head" of the octopus much smaller maybe two times before realizing that this was going to need to be large. Taking all the stuff I learned on my own through trial and error and from my sculpting class last semester, I think I did a pretty good job on this one. I did end up having two of the tentacles break off when I moved the piece from the bat to the kiln shelf so it could be bisque fired (currently have maybe two hours left in that, and it was still not exploded about 3 hours ago).

I'll have to try to get the two tentacles and the suckers that fell off to stay on when I glaze the piece or I'll have to glue them together after the glaze firing. I don't think they suckers would have fallen off in the numbers that they had if I had remembered to add them to the tentacles before attaching them to the "head". I really should look up what that part of the octopus is really called (it's called the head or mantle, from a quick Google search).

After asking for some advice on the colouring for the octopus itself, the always magical Emma Ríos suggested this and I actually think I can pull it off.

As long as it doesn't explode in the last few hours of firing, I should be able to start on the glaze tomorrow. It should be interesting to see how close (or how far off) I get to that adorable pink octopus. If I had a nice purple or pink celadon that had those blooming crystals in it, that would be too perfect for this.